Instagram Use Is Exploding

In just six months, Instagram use has more than septupled, growing from around 900,000 people per day to around 7.3 million, according to ComScore. The photo-sharing app’s astonishing growth underscores the growing momentum of mobile-native apps, and the potential of said apps to open wide leads over traditional websites.

Instagram effectively has no website; though the social network’s photos live on the web, it can only be driven through mobile app. Like the popular check-in service Foursquare, Instagram is truly native to mobile and specifically to smartphones. Even before evidence of Instagram’s amazing six-month growth spurt, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists were becoming obsessed with the mobile frontier and with the potential of mobile-first development. Much as bricks-and-mortar companies raced to develop web strategies in the mid 1990s, today’s web properties, including relative newcomers like Facebook, are racing to draw up aggressive attack plans for mobile.

Instagram now claims more U.S. daily users than Twitter, across both apps and web. Source: ComScore

Even Twitter, whose roots are in mobile phones, is being eclipsed by mobile-native Instagram. Comscore says that in the U.S., Instagram’s 7.3 million daily web and app users in August surpassed Twitter’s 6.9 million daily web and app users, the first time that’s happened (see chart). As Mike Isaac of All Things D wroteof the switch, “the massive shift in user traffic to mobile devices is a real thing.”

Twitter was for several years a web, rather than smartphone, focused company; though it was built on top of text messaging, the microblogging service quickly turned its attention to its site and didn’t release its first smartphone app until 2010, four years after Twitter started. In fairness, Twitter’s smartphone app still predated Instagram’s birth, and Twitter for years nurtured an ecosystem of third-party apps. But it was never such a mobile purebred as Instagram.

Of course, many previous mobile apps have surged like Instagram only to fizzle out. But people seem to genuinely enjoy looking at friends’ pictures on Instagram, and uploading snapshots of their own. The average visitor spent a total of four hours on the site during the month of August, compared to less than three hours for the average Twitter visitor, ComScore says.

That kind of engagement is only going to stoke Silicon Valley’s hunger for mobile-native social networks. If you think the hype around Apple’s iPhone launches is excessive, brace yourself: The collective din of Instagram’s would-be peers promoting their disruptive potential is probably going to render you… well, the opposite of mobile.